A Tale of Two Sunflowers

On the quick trip up to the Twin Cities that I showed you the other week, I got some car knitting done of a project I started right before our Family Camp vacation (and worked on at camp).

Here it is at camp, not too far into it. This is the lovely Girasole by Jared Flood. I’m knitting it here in mmmMalabrigo Sock from The Loopy Ewe in the colorway Ochre (it looked somewhat Sunflower-ish to me — that’s what Girasole means). I have some thoughts of lightly overdyeing the edges and center with brown, subtly; we’ll see. My nerve may fail me.

Though I’m also working on a Seekrit Project or two or three, I had been working on this on and off and making progress (when I wasn’t misplacing my second and third skeins of yarn). Here it is after the Twin Cities trip.

It’s such a pretty pattern! And the yarn is lovely to work with.

This project is not destined for anyone or anything in particular at this point, I’m just knitting it for fun and because there is a Loopy Ewe KAL (knitalong) going on.

But as I knit, and as I petted an amazing skein of yarn I have from my favorite hand-dyed yarn purveyor, Twisted Fiber Art, I had an idea of knitting this lace project in that colorway and dyeing style (Ember Evolutions). And I couldn’t get it out of my head.

Lucky, lucky me. Shortly thereafter, my number came up to be a ‘custom’ customer at Twisted. You can sign up and in turn, eventually, you get the chance to have essentially free run of the store and order any yarn you want in any quantity you want. This was not a quantity or kind of yarn I would normally be able to get in an update, even if I got lucky. Plus, I was probably going to want a coordinating yarn dyed at the same time to do the edging, and that yarn base wasn’t even offered in the coordinating yarn. But as a Custom customer….the world was my oyster!

So I took the plunge and ordered the yarn for Girasole in Ember, in the Muse yarn (a merino/silk light sportweight yarn, lovely!), with coordinating yarn for the edging in the greyish part of the colorway.

It came the other day. The picture doesn’t do it justice, but I tried.

Ember Evolution and Sky

I had a weak moment and I cast on for the second Girasole just to see how it would start to look.

(And then I stopped. Can’t wait to get back to it, though.)

Granted, it doesn’t look a lot like this real-life sunflower from my front yard:

(On a sunnier Saturday than today… )

But I think it will be a gorgeous fantastical Girasole, when it’s done!

6 responses to “A Tale of Two Sunflowers”

Both your Girasoles are gorgeous! When you mentioned awhile ago on the blog that you had something special planned for a second one, I figured it would have to be in the Twisted Fiber Arts yarn…I’m so excited to see that I was right! I can’t wait to see more of it.